Apps & Software

The startup has released free online educational materials in beta to the public. The Boston based startup says on its site, its making the world’s open educational content more useful for students by connecting them with the wealth of high quality, openly licensed, and free educational content created by leading education experts with more than 20 years in the field.

The AT&T Developer Program and Apigee produced the Mobile App Hackathon in Los Angeles, California. Spearheaded by Alex Donn, the event was designed for both technical and non-technical attendees to build apps over the course of a weekend at Io/La, an incubator/co-work space in the heart of Hollywood. This was a free event boasting prizes for winners of various categories such as cash, gift cards, free month stay at Io/La and many more! Breakfast, lunch and dinner were also provided, as well as snacks and other swag –like t-shirts, posters, markers, water bottles, energy drinks, bags, notebooks, etc.

Today Chris Jones,Microsoft Windows Live VP has unveiled what he says is a modern email for the next billion mailboxes.
He says in a blog post,” We’ve also been hard at work on a mission to reinvent personal email – from the datacenter all the way to the user experience”.

Yesterday Viddy, the social video sharing site announced the launch of their public API for developers to build around the platform and come up with new ways of sharing video. To top it off they also announced a “Rule the Beach: Hack Your Way into Viddy” developer competition in a blog post:

Exciting news for the Los Angeles Tech scene last week as Apptopia closed a $1 million dollar round of funding. The Santa Monica and Boston based online marketplace for mobile apps had their recent round led by none other than Mark Cuban. Of the one million raised Cuban himself both in $500,000 showing his excitement and belief in the booming company.

Gabi is not someone you know, she is not your friend next door nor your brother’s girlfriend, she is not even a she after all. A much more different Gabi is making news here.
A new startup from as far as Berlin, loui AppsUG is making Facebook more interesting and personalized to as real as following status updates relating to one’s mood and preferences.

This morning Dustin Moskovitz announced that Asana had got a $28 million investment from Peter Thiel and Founders Fund. Welcoming Thiel to their Board of Directors.
Moskovitz said they have admired and respected Founders Fund and loved their commitment to building teams to improve lives.

On Tuesday PayPal acquired card.io, a smartphone credit card scanner.
According to Hill Ferguson, VP Global Product PayPal, card.io will integrate its credit card information capturing technology to PayPal’s mobile wallet. The payment details were not made public.

Calling or texting while driving is a traffic offence punishable under the US federal law.
But Nuance has cancelled it (sadly only for those with BMW 7 Series).
The firm this week launched a new feature for the 2012 BMW 7 Series, dubbed the Dragon Drive! Messaging. The feature will be extended on the BMW 3 Series Touring and BMW 3 Series ActiveHybrid vehicles this summer.

According to Dow Jones, sources close to Facebook say the giant social network is reportedly working on a job board through a third party firm to be launched this summer.
While Facebook has not officially announced anything, if it releases a job board, there will be a shift in the online recruitment sector.